The Boko Haram Girls May Already Have Been Mutilated

The entire world is focused on the captured Nigerian girls, many scenarios have been envisioned--and yet there is at least one issue no one has raised: That it is entirely possible that these poor girls have also been genitally mutilated. If so, that means that their rapes will be doubly torturous and traumatizing.

And make no mistake: They will be raped by their captors on their "wedding" night and/or over and over again by strangers if they are trafficked into a brothel.

Nigeria is both an African and an increasingly Muslim country. Read the exquisite and excruciating Memoirs about being genitally mutilated by Soraya Mire (The Girl with Three Legs) and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Infidel), both of whom write about their horrific experiences in Somalia.

Experts have warred over whether female genital mutilation (FGM) is primarily pre-Islamic and tribally African or whether there is a basis for it in Islam. Both points of view have merit.

To the extent to which Boko Haram are following the rules of Islamic Jihad (and they are, they surely are), they will not think of rape as "rape." This is what women are for, to be used, to be profitable, to produce children and be domestic slaves. A Boko Haram warrior will have no conception of how this intimately violent act affects his victim--whom he does not think of as a "victim." These are Western and infidel concepts and Boko Haram--they are forbidden.

Boko Haram are, no doubt, using rape, not as a spoil of war, and not as a weapon of war, but as a form of gender cleansing, also possibly as a form of religious or ethnic cleansing when the victims are not Muslims.

This kind of Jihad-rape was widely practiced in Sudan. Black African girls and women, sent out to forage for firewood and water, were publicly, repeatedly, gang-raped by ethnic Arab Muslims; some children were as young as five or six years old.

Rape shames its victims, it breaks them, they offer no resistance and become resigned to a life of suffering. Many rape victims become clinically depressed and suicidal.

Imagine the pain of being forcibly penetrated when you have been sewn shut and thick scar tissue exists where there was once a clitoris, labia, and a vagina.

According to UNICEF, the U.S. State Department, and a variety of medical reports, either there are 30 million genitally mutilated women in Nigeria; or 41% of the female population has been mutilated. One report guesstimated that between 10-90% of women in the state of Borno, where Boko Haram are based, have been genitally mutilated.

In 2007, Thomas von der Osten-Sacken and Thomas Uwer wrote in the Middle East Quarterly, "there are indications that FGM might be a phenomenon of epidemic proportions in the Arab Middle East" and being done, not for African tribal reasons, but for Islamic reasons. The authors note that, surprisingly, FGM has been widely practiced in "Iraqi Kurdistan and in other parts of the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf." They believe that Arab Muslim societies are not free or stable enough to allow serious research on this subject. The women who perform this atrocity believe they are doing what the Qu'ran or the Hadith command.

In 2013, Shereen El Feki, in Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World, documented the epidemic nature of FGM in Egypt where more than 90% of the women have been mutilated. Increasingly, doctors and nurses perform the procedure. El Feki writes: "Those who support FGM believe they have God on their side...that the practice is obligatory for Muslims....the Prophet Muhammad is said to have advised a female practitioner in Medina to "not cut too severely as that is better for a woman and more desirable for a husband."

Whether FGM is truly a "Muslim" obligation or whether it isn't, what matters is that so many Muslims believe it is and therefore act accordingly.

I hope that U.S. Navy Seals are on the ground and about to find these poor girls. I fear their fate was sealed long ago when radical Islam arose in the world again and the West, for many reasons, did nothing to stop it.

We are not accepting comments at this time, please go to the Facebook page to generate discussion!